Podcast for Teachers: Maximizing Co-Teaching for Student Success

Maximizing Co-Teaching for Student Success

Co-teaching teams provide benefits to teachers as they collaborate to maximize personalized learning for their students. Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld, experienced co-teacher and researcher, joins Steve to explore the challenges of building from I/My to We/Our.

Visit Dr. Honigsfeld’s website here.

Email Dr. Honigsfeld: ahonigsfeld@gmail.com

Find Dr. Honigsfeld on Twitter: @AndreaHonigsfel

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTSteve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello, and welcome to the teacher edition of the Steve Barkley Ponders Out loud podcast. The complexity of teaching is both challenging and rewarding. And my curiosity is peaked whenever I explore with teachers the multiple pathways for facilitating student engagement in the exciting world of learning. This podcast looks to serve teachers as they motivate coach and support their learners.

Steve: 00:30 Maximizing co-teaching for student success. Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld is an experienced English as a foreign language teacher in Hungary and an English as a second language teacher in New York City. She’s joining our podcast today to share insights on the values of co-teaching for maximizing student success. She is currently a professor in the division of education at Malloy College in Rockville center, New York, and she’s an author and consultant on the topic of co-teaching. Welcome, Andrea.

Steve: 01:06 Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Steve: 01:09 So Andrea, teachers always want to know about a consultant author’s teaching experience. So tell folks a little bit about your experiences with with co-teaching.

Andrea: 01:24 Sure. So by training, I’m a high school English and Hungarian teacher. I was born and raised and educated in Hungary, and I actually went back to teaching my own middle school when I was a student in Hungary years before, so it was very exciting to be a colleague to my former teachers who I now can address informally and collaborate with and learn from. And then when I left Hungary and I found myself in New York city, I became an elementary ESL – that’s the label that we used at that time, English as a Second Language teacher at the elementary level, kindergarten through third grade. My student teaching was at the high school level. So I pretty much found myself in every type of classroom from kindergarten, all the way to high school, as well as in adult education classes, both in Hungary where English was a very, very popular language to learn.

Andrea: 02:24 I was a teacher of adult ESL and when I came to the United States, I continued that line of work as well. I actually taught on Saturday and Sunday mornings in a small, tiny little school, right by the train station in Woodside Queens. And I just so respected my students who gave up their, probably, only free day. They worked six to eight weeks and they were there either Saturday morning or Sunday morning learning English. So then fast forward, I completed my doctorate and I joined a college. I’m still there, Malloy college. They hired me to start a TESOL and post-masters program in TESOL. So now going from being in the classroom, I became a teacher educator and I focused a lot on developing a practitioner-oriented masters and postmasters programs and I spent a lot of time in the classroom coaching, continuing to stay connected to what’s happening in the actual classroom environment.

Steve: 03:33 What would you describe as the as the payoffs of co-teaching for the teacher? What are the benefits for me of entering into a co-teaching setting?

Andrea: 03:45 For teachers, the strongest benefit is capacity building and partnership building that you don’t have to do it alone. The job is huge. To support our multilingual learners in acquiring language and acquiring learning content simultaneously, to make sure that they can make more than a year’s progress in a year, as well as developing the academic language and literacy skills that are prerequisites and co-requisites of academic success. Well, when you do it in collaboration with a colleague, with a partner, you feel that you can bounce ideas off of each other. We always have our favorite go-to strategies that now we can learn side by side by talking through those strategies, sharing existing practices, as well as experimenting with new kinds of practices, as technology is getting more and more integrated in our teaching. Or any kind of new initiative is rolled out in a particular school or district, when you’re learning that with a partner, it’s just going to be more beneficial for the individual, for the educator as well as for the student.

Steve: 04:53 Yeah. I’ve always found that when you’re a trial and erroring, it’s easier to error if somebody else’s joining you in it than if you’re erroring on your own. And besides the fact that it speeds the learning from it, the ability to brief what is it that happened here and talk that through with somebody else’s is powerful. How about for the students? What would you say the biggest benefits for the students of teachers co-teaching?

Andrea: 05:24 The greatest benefit for them is that we can reduce teacher student ratio. So we’re going to have more attention dedicated to the individual student, whether it’s in support of their language development, literacy development, or content attainment. So in a co-taught setting, the various configurations, we could introduce the lesson together. It’s like a co-teaching dance. We introduce the lesson together, the mini lesson, maybe a recap of what was thought before, modeling some kind of solving a math problem or an experiment in a science classroom. But sooner, rather than later, we should really break up into small groups. When a teacher is alone, they can still do small group work, Kagan structures or learning stations, learning rotations, learning centers, sure. But when we have two teachers in the room, then those two teachers can circulate and get to the students with more frequency. They could target students’ identified needs, they can observe and assess and monitor student progress much better because now we have two adults who are doing that kind of work.

Andrea: 06:24 And actually more frequently than not, I’ve also seen three adults in some of these classrooms, either a teaching assistant and instructional aid or paraprofessional, there are different names based on where you are in the United States or in the world. How we identify that support personnel as well as sometimes, special educators are also working alongside English language development or ELL teachers and content teachers. So the three way collaboration makes it even more challenging for the teachers, but even more rewarding when it works well for the sake of the students.

Steve: 07:04 So I’m almost hearing, if you put another person in the room, I’m doubling the students’ opportunity to get the feedback or the personalized extra attention that the student might need.

Andrea: 07:21 Absolutely. And different types of methodologies are also introduced. I’ve seen a number of times in my own coaching that one teacher was really savvy with technology. The whiteboard was a smart board and Flipgrid and different ways that the students are able to participate through digital tools while the other teacher was masterful in conducting, let’s say Socratic seminars and engaging students in content-based dialogues and discourse. So everybody has their own strengths. When we combine those strengths and assets in the classroom, the students will benefit because there’s not one right way that we can support multilingual learners’ development. There’s not one quick checklist that if only you do these five things, you’ll be fine. So we need a multi-dimensional classroom environment in which we infuse a lot of different strategies into our teaching.

Steve: 08:15 I have to tell you one of the things that I always found as the benefit – there were just kids that warmed up better to one of us than the other one. Almost like the magnet to some kids. And so I’d have kids that were assigned to me, but boy, they just made a much deeper connection with my partner than they did with me. And it felt so comforting when I would see my student connect with another teacher in a different way than the student connected with me, but I knew that the student was getting it. They were getting that attention that was so important to them.

Andrea: 08:59 Yeah. If I could make one other point about this, because I’m so appreciative that you shared your story and how generously you celebrated that opportunity for your students to be comfortable with another teacher, rather than this old notion of my kids, my students, my curriculum, my classroom. So how do we move away from that first person, singular mindset and move into a we, or more collective, more collaborative mindset around teaching. And one of the most powerful examples of that, that I witnessed, observed and heard from teachers too, is when the English language development teacher, the ELD or ESL, ENL teacher tells me that the general education student, the English proficiency student also seeks out their support. So the students no longer see that you see are there for those kids. You were their teachers and I’m somebody else’s teacher. So
I think that is a huge shift when students start seeing both teachers as being everybody’s teacher.

Steve: 10:10 And the other side of that shift is the work I do with professional learning communities that everybody is seeing the students as our students. So I may be here to serve the the English language learner, but the 14 other kids in the class are mine too. As well as the English language learners growth in languages, the classroom teacher’s role. So if we take shared responsibility for the kids, that’s what pulls us together as a teaching team. Andrea, there’s a lot of challenges that teachers face when they first enter a co-teaching partnership. I’m wondering if you’d talk a little bit about those challenges and maybe the strategies for tackling them early on informing co-teaching partnerships.

Andrea: 11:02 Sure. I can cite the most frequently mentioned challenges for you, both from my research and classroom-based experience. Number one is time. And I think that’s probably applies to every single educator that we have this scarcity of time, available time to implement new curriculum, develop new curriculum, examine our work, look at student work and so forth. But when it comes to co-teaching, administrative support and systemic support for collaboration, time, collaborative time, co-planning time, to me, it’s non-negotiable. I know I’m using a very strong word here. I used to be a little softer, but I think over the years, you figure out that you need to come across with clarity around how co-teaching does not happen without co-planning. If there’s no co-planning, there’s no co-teaching. If there’s no co assessment, when we look at student work, when we examine data systematically, then we can co-teach effectively. So connecting co-planning co-teaching reflection and co-assessment as an entire cycle is critical.

Andrea: 12:11 So if the teachers are not provided time to do that, then they suddenly signed that as a major concern and there’s not enough time. So one teacher comes into the classroom and simply says, what are we doing today? Or what are you doing today? And that’s no longer co-teaching. At at best, it could be in class support, but then we’re siloing the children and the in-class support is targeting a handful of children rather than collaboratively serving all children. The second, most frequently cited issue is when there’s no parody or there’s just emerging parody or equity among the co-teachers and one teacher feels that he or she is a highly paid aid and is not able to contribute to the lesson with the type of instructional intensity that would truly impact student learning. So how do we work around that? So the first point I mentioned about the time, often that’s an administrative issue. How to revisit the master schedule, how to provide additional professional learning opportunities.

Andrea: 13:14 But this notion of building the partnership is also connected, both administrative and coaching responsibilities, as well as internal motivation or intrinsic motivation from the co-teachers that we are going to build a partnership. It will be how we present ourselves to the students. It’s not about one teacher being the lead and shining all the time and then the other one is in that supporting actor or actress role, but creating a partnership in which both teachers have equal or equitable participation and opportunity to work with the students. So that doesn’t come easily, unless of course, it’s a chemistry, it’s a quick click between the teachers. Typically, it takes time and monitoring how the dynamics in the classroom or maybe even video coaching so that the teachers could really look at how one teacher just kept saying, I expect you to do this, or my expectations for you are these as he or she talks to the students and the other teacher is literally on the sidelines, just waiting to have a turn.

Steve: 14:25 One of the strategies that I encourage people to build into those early planning conversations is around a phrase I use called student learning production behaviors. So, what is it that the students need to do that’s going to cause the learning? So I might be in your classroom today in a role where I’m not deep into the content the way you are. But if you can tell me what it is we need to get the kids to do to cause the learning to happen, then my interactions with the kids are driven towards getting those learning behaviors. Versus when I see that that’s missing, the behaviors, get driven towards helping the kids get the work done. And get the work done may not be what’s producing the learning. So if I can get the people talking to each other, when we’re watching the learners, what is it we want to be seeing and hearing the learners doing? And now we both can go to work to make that happen. If you’re the language person, you might be assisting me on what those English language learners’ behaviors need to be so that as the classroom teacher, I’m helping get those. And I can share what the content behaviors are and now we’re both working together to generate that, that set of behaviors.

Andrea: 15:46 So from the English language development perspective, in a co-taught setting, I often coach or guide teachers to examine their upcoming lessons, units, curriculum through two lenses. Like when I wear my glasses, there are two lenses on it. So one lens is going to be the cognitive lens or the academic lens. The other one is going to be the linguistic, language or literacy lens. And the big question as we co-plan or review the curriculum will be, what are the academic and linguistic demands of the upcoming lesson or curriculum? But then the demands is sort of a harsh deficit oriented word. So what if we switched that word around and now change it to opportunities? What would be the academic or cognitive opportunities to, as you said, to demonstrate learning, what are we going to be looking for for the students to be doing with the content? And the same time you can forget about that content cannot be taught without language, even mathematics. Even when we think that math is the universal language, not really, you’re going to need precise academic language to be able to solve a math problem. So what is the linguistic demand of that upcoming lesson, or again, switching the words around, what is the linguistic opportunity or literacy opportunity for the students to fully engage with the content? So that is very similar to your thinking.

Steve: 17:12 It really is because the big change in my work was when I switched from watching teaching, to watching learning. So when my time is spent in a pre-conference, what I’m mostly asking is, talk to me about what it is you need to get the kids to do. And then I’m watching the kids. And if the choices you made or getting the kids to do what you said, you needed them to do, that’s going to be great feedback for you. And if the choices aren’t getting it and now when I got two teachers working together and some students with special needs, what’s the support that the special needs student has to have so that he or she can engage in those learning behaviors?

Andrea: 17:57 Similarly, linguistically, what are the linguistic expectations and opportunities? And the added challenge of course, is, we have English language development on at least five different levels. So if you’re using the wida standards or any kind of established framework, sometimes it’s only four levels. Sometimes it’s even three levels, beginning, intermediate, and advanced, but more currently we’re using five levels of language proficiencies. And that’s huge to consider that on all five levels students could and should –

Steve: 18:28 And I could have all five, right?

Andrea: 18:32 Yeah. And what does that going to look like? So having those conversations, planning is essential. You can’t just walk into a
classroom and figure it out in the moment. The work is too big for that.

Steve: 18:44 As I moved to closing out, I want to give you an opportunity – one of the most important words of wisdom that you might want to leave with teachers who are who are entering into a co-teaching opportunities.

Andrea: 19:01 Focus on the relationship first.

Steve: 19:04 Got it.

Andrea: 19:05 If you asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have probably asked them as heretic with pedagogy co-teaching models, and then you live and learn and you realize that a strong partnership actually is absolutely pivotal for this.

Steve: 19:25 Thank you. Would you share with folks easiest ways for them to get in touch with you to follow up questions they might have, or to look at the resources that you have available?

Andrea: 19:38 Sure. My email is Ahonigsfeld@gmail.com and of all the social media platforms, I’m very active on Twitter and that’s @andreahonigsfel – that’s my Twitter handle without the D. I also have a website, andreahonigsfeld.com. And I have a lot of my books produced either by Heinemann or by Corbin press.

Steve: 20:01 Well, we’ll put all that information on the lead-in to the podcast. Andrea, thank you so much. Really appreciate the time and
sharing that you did with us.

Andrea: 20:10 Thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it too.

Steve [Outro]: 20:16 Thanks for listening in folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter @stevebarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.




Podcast: Coaching Co-teaching Teams

Coaching Co-teaching Teams

Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld, a researcher and consultant with co-teaching experience and expertise, joins Steve to explore how instructional coaches and administrators can support co-teaching teams. Her analogy of co-teaching teams as an arranged marriage generates interesting reflections on the need to build developmental relationships.

Visit Dr. Honigsfeld’s website here.

Contact Dr. Honigsfeld: ahonigsfeld@gmail.com

Find Dr. Honigsfeld on Twitter: @AndreaHonigsfel

Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTSteve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello and welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. Instructional coaches and leaders create the environment that supports teachers to continually imagine, grow and achieve. They model an excitement for learning that teachers in turn model for students. This podcast is dedicated to promoting the important aspects of instructional leadership. Thanks for listening.

Steve: 00:27 Coaching co-teaching teams. Joining us today is Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld, who is a professor in the division of education at Malloy College, Rockville Center, New York. Andrea was an English as a foreign language teacher in Hungary and English as a second language teacher in New York City. She’s written and consulted extensively on the topic of co-teaching. Frequent listeners to this blog know that I have continued support for the idea that students are best served by teams of teachers working in various designs and makeups so I’m excited to have this conversation with Andrea today. Welcome Andrea.

Andrea: 01:13 Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I’m very excited to share with you about my research as well as the practical applications of this type of work and serving multilingual learners for the coaching community.

Steve: 01:28 Thank you. So for starters, would you talk a little bit about your earliest co-teaching experiences and how that’s influenced the work you’re doing today?

Andrea: 01:39 Oh, absolutely. My most formative experience in my entire teaching career was the first time I stood in front of a group of students in Hungary. By training, I’m a school English and Hungarian teacher and in the fourth year of a five-year teacher education program, we were invited to try out what we know about pedagogy and teach a lesson just to get our feet wet. But a professor in this course called pedagogy, said that you have to choose a college classmate to go into the classroom because you’re newbies. You really don’t know yet what you’re doing, so collaborate work together on that lesson plan and then go teach together. And I will never forget that day. And then of course I did forget for quite some time because I didn’t have an opportunity to do it again until many years later, I found myself in the New York city public school system as an ESL, at that time, that’s what we were called, ESL teacher.

Andrea: 02:41 And I had a visionary principal, Carol Wertheimer, and Carol said to us, this was in the early 1990s, why don’t we try what special ed is doing? Why are we pulling these children out, spending so much time in the hallway, gathering them up from various classrooms, taking them back to the ESL room, which you might have guessed was in the basement. Yes, it was actually behind the stage, a former dressing room. So just imagine this beautiful, classic New York city public school with the super high ceilings and large corridors. So we’re walking about 10 minutes to, and back to the classroom. So she said that’s a lot of instructional time wasted so let’s try what special ed is doing and at that time they called it the push in model. I didn’t really like that terminology because it sounded like I’m forcing myself into somebody’s classroom, but that was the terminology, pull out and push in.

Andrea: 03:41 So I found myself as a push in teacher and I had the most fabulous year in my career because my co-teacher and I just hit it off. It was a second grade integrated class. We did not know what to call it, so we just worked together. We figured it out. There were no books, no articles. We could glean some insight from special ed what they are doing with the inclusion model, but we created our own framework for what co-teaching is all about. And then of course, years went by and again, I forgot about that because my life took me to a doctoral program and then to a college position. So periodically, co-teaching was something so important to me that at one point, I found a coauthor, I didn’t know that she was going to be my coauthor, a colleague, Dr. Maria Dove, who was also very passionate about co-teaching. So the two of us put our heads together and we thought there was still no literature on this. Nobody’s writing about it. There’s very, very limited emerging research on it. Why don’t we try to do something in this area because we’re both very passionate about it. And that’s how our research and publication as well as consulting pathway began, and that I’m putting it into like 2008, 2009. So it’s really decades of a journey for me to get where I am today, having written extensively on this topic.

Steve: 05:08 I have to tell you that as always listening to your story about picking the kids up and going back to the room behind the stage, I’ve just been working recently with schools looking at the “learning loss” from COVID and virtual and looking at the difference between approaching it with acceleration versus approaching it with remediation. And it’s a definite remediate remediation picture when a student knows they’re leaving the classroom and leaving what everybody else is doing to go down to the room behind this age and do some lesson to get “caught up,” and coming back feeling further behind than probably when they left. So the difference of that co-teaching model where the support is right there when the student needs it to work on the same content that the rest of the students are working on. So the picture just jumps right out.

Andrea: 06:14 Absolutely.

Steve: 06:14 Andrea, folks listening to this podcast are mostly working in roles as coaches and as school administrators. And for those who are promoting different kinds of co-teaching scenarios, what’s some of the research or information that they should be passing on to teachers about the value of of these co-teaching opportunities?

Andrea: 06:43 There are multiple bodies of research that inform this practice. I would think that the most powerful would be from leading researcher, John Hattie, and others who have similar findings connected to collective teacher efficacy. So this idea that when we collaborate, our collaborative expertise is going to have a higher impact on student learning than what I could have as an individual teacher, because we have that shared efficacy that we believe that together, there are many more perspectives, many more strategies, many more ways that we can reach and challenge our students than any one teacher could do it alone. So that’s the body of research. A second body of research that’s really critical and that sets us apart from special education inclusion is the notion of content and language integration. That we no longer teach language for its own sake. We don’t teach language just for communicative competence.

Andrea: 07:49 We could do that maybe in a world language class where we want our students to be conversational in Spanish or in French or any Italian, but within the context of English language development or any kind of dual language context, it doesn’t have to be English necessarily. But if the goal is academic competence in a particular language, then we need to connect that academic language to the academic content so that the students are simultaneously working with rigorous content and building the academic language that’s necessary for that. So that’s what’s really amazing about a line of research, very strongly advocating for that and how I can connect that to that in co-teaching because the two teachers are now supporting language and academic development at the same time.

Steve: 08:43 One of the questions that always comes up about people working effectively and in any kind of a team setting is, is one of trust. And I’m wondering if you might share thoughts on helping teachers who are new to co-teaching partnerships look at building that trust.

Andrea: 09:04 Absolutely. Since you were asking me about bodies of research earlier, I can’t help but think about the research around relational trust and creating an educational environment or any kind of work environment in which there is a solid foundation of trust among those who work together, whether it’s the two co-teachers or the coach who’s supporting their collaboration or the administrator who creates the master schedule in which collaborative time is embedded, that the teachers know that they will have additional support for their work so that they could launch the co-teaching or strengthen their co-teaching partnership. So relational trust is really critical in the sense of building that trust around understanding our own strengths and assets, what we bring to the partnership and honoring our partner’s strengths and assets and knowledge and avoiding any kind of shame and blame. It is not about that. It’s merging the first person, singular, I, to make it the first person plural, we, so that we together, can have an impact on student learning. So how do we do that? It definitely happens incrementally, it definitely happens through systemic support for communication and ample time for teachers to work out different philosophies, different teaching styles, different thinking along what works for this population and honoring each other’s expertise, clinical expertise, in class expertise, knowledge base, and having a platform where I can freely share what I know about this work without feeling that I misspeak. So that takes time because it’s a lot of communication, a lot of trial and error, and definitely the larger systemic support for collaboration time is what we need.

Steve: 11:02 You laid out important words there. I was hanging on the first one that I was going to come back to, and that was you work it out. And so then the work it out requires trial and error, requires time. So the coaching is really built around assisting people and working it out. I know people would like to develop the trust before they start but that doesn’t work. You gotta jump in and build it.

Andrea: 11:29 Yes. And sometimes, work it out means that there are set protocols. So that’s why coaching can also step in. So as we know, sometimes we joke about co-teaching using the marriage metaphor, that some of these marriages are love at first sight and the two co-teachers just click and there’s chemistry. And I have observed it so many times, including when co-teachers show up, literally dressed alike when they never talked a lot about they’re going to be coming to school with, but there’s such synergy between the two educators and the same way the coach can develop that kind of synergy with his or her clients as well. But other times, after all, it’s an arranged marriage, I’m hoping I’m not offending anybody with this metaphor I’m borrowing from Wendy Murawski. So sometimes, it’s not something that the teachers necessarily signed up for or had a choice in who that with their partner would be.

Andrea: 12:27 So building that trusting relationship is going to take time. And the structured approach to that is through protocol. So there are sharing protocols, there are goal-setting protocols, there are a number of different protocols that teachers and administrators and coaches can use to make sure that the limited amount of time that they usually have to work these things out, as you said, will be productive. So it could be a 20 minute time set aside for celebrations and goal setting. So we’re starting with what worked in the past week, or since we last met, what is one thing that we’re wondering about, what is another thing that we’re noticing and what is one goal that we can set to strengthen our partnership? I really like when these protocols are tight and neat, so that we keep our focus on what’s really critical, which is advancing the partnership and advancing the ways that we can support our students.

Steve: 13:25 You caused a big smile to come to my face because I team taught with a with a woman for five years and about the third or fourth year, we joked at how often we showed up dressed, rather similarly that people were convinced we had called and planned something for the day. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the administrator and coach being able to observe co-teaching and practice, and then being able to give coaching feedback to a team, rather than giving coaching feedback to an individual.

Andrea: 14:04 Absolutely. A critical aspect of this kind of supervision or coaching depending on who goes into the classroom that’s co-taught and what the goal is, is to have a pre-observation or pre-visit conversation with the co-teachers. And the reason is because in my work, in my books and articles and trainings, I often guide co-teachers to start with your why, borrowing from Simon Sinek and many others. So set an intention. What is your intention in that lesson? Obviously, what are the goals? What are the learning intentions? What are the desired outcomes? What’s the success criteria? And when we start with that conversation, then the co-teaching models, the roles and responsibilities will be closely aligned to the clarity of the lesson, rather than the other way around. I’ve heard from teachers and administrators who approach the coaching or the observation from the angle of, I’d really like to see group work, or I’d really like to see how you are delivering instruction upfront. And to me, that’s backwards because we always have to start with, what is the goal of the lesson? What are the desired outcomes for the students? What are their needs? And based on student needs, the co-teachers will negotiate the natural flow of the lesson with the different configurations and the roles and responsibilities. So having a pre-observation conference with the educator, with the coach or the administrator, would be tremendously helpful because then there could be some clarity established around the look for’s.

Steve: 15:45 In my coaching work, I describe the pre-conference as the most important step. And when people get short on time, it’s the one they want to skip and I come back to them and I suggest if you have a good pre-conference, even if you don’t get to do the observation and the post-conference, people will grow from the thinking they did in a good pre-conference. So I’m kind of hearing as I listen to you that it’s probably even more important observing a team because you’re looking to understand I’m guessing, their individual thinking as well as their team team thinking. So as an observer, I often say that as a coach, I’d like to look at the lesson through the eyes of the teacher. So the pre-conference kind of lets me get to the eyes of the teacher, how the teachers looking at this. And I can see that, especially if I’m working with a a person who’s a content specialist and a person who’s the language learning specialist, and now they’re working together and now I’m coming in and observing as a coach, can I get this concept of looking at what’s happening here through both of their eyes?

Andrea: 16:58 Absolutely. I think we are aligned in our thinking around what’s necessary and what’s productive and helpful to the collaborating teachers. And often, I’m not sure we’ve the coaching session lasts for the entire period. Sometimes co-teachers that I work with, I ask them to plan lessons, sequences, meaning two, three lessons that flow together because language is not learned or acquired in 45 minute chunks. So if you’re focusing on maybe the narrative genre and storytelling in the past tense, you don’t learn the past tense in a single day or the various ways that text markers will indicate that we’re telling a story. So if there’s a lesson sequence, it’s very rare that the administrator or the coach would be there for the entire lesson sequence. This way, this pre-conference conversation could definitely allow the observer to see the larger scheme of things and how that particular slice of life that particular observed lesson fits into it. And the reason why that’s important is because in my work, I have identified with Maria seven co-teaching models, and there’s no way that you can squeeze in seven co-teaching models in the 45 minute period. But in a lesson sequence, chances are that there will be a lot more variations and of configurations of how the lesson is delivered. So I think the broader picture is just as important as that slice of life when I walk in through the door and see some dynamic collaboration between the two teachers.

Steve: 18:31 Well Andrea, I really appreciate the insights you’ve shared with us. I’m wondering if you’d pass on the best way for listeners to be able to get in touch with you, maybe find out about those seven different strategies that you just talked about and some of the resources that you have available for people.

Andrea: 18:51 Oh, sure. That’s very kind of you to allow me to do that. So I have published extensively on co-teaching with Corwin press. I have my own website too, which is my first name and last name, andreahonigsfeld.com and I do answer every email. So if people email me, I’m very happy to respond, offering some additional answers or resources. My email is ahonigsfeld@gmail.com. And finally, I’m very active on Twitter. So if somebody wants to look me up, it’s @AndreaHonigsfel without the D because my name is too long.

Steve: 19:25 We will put all that information and the lead-in to the podcast so folks who are doing this while they’re out on a walk, can get back in and go online and get the specifics. Thank you so much, much appreciated.

Andrea: 19:39 Thank you.

Steve [Outro]: 19:42 Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean. And please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter @stevebarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com